’It depends’ is something horse trainers say which used to wind me up good and proper. I thought they were doing it to be enigmatic or convince me I needed a lesson with them. It also used to really get my goat that people like Tom and Sarah would say, ‘I really can’t suggest something without seeing the horse’. BUT PLEASE JUST TELL ME WHAT TO DO! Now, having rather oddly ending up in the position where people contact me to ask for advice about their horse, I hear myself saying (or writing) ‘ Well it depends....’ and , ‘I guess I can’t really say without seeing the horse’. And I can only imagine how annoying that must be. However, it turns out it is the only genuine thing you can say. Take my own recent misjudgement and how it turned out to be an ‘It depends’ situation with two horses I know very well. All three of my horses are naturally very generous with their energy, and it is easy to feel like a certain pelvis-tilting moustachioed man at C&A (you know who I mean) in terms of creating forwards energy with a glance of your eye, an out breath and a change in your posture (both on the ground and under saddle). What I had begun to realise was less easily influenced by me, were the downward transitions. In Des’s case it was a little, ‘Yeah, in a minute human, I’m doing stuff!’ In Tycoon’s it was, ‘Hang on while I just get my balance here, give us a second, I’m trying really hard....’. And therein lies the difference which I failed to spot adequately and which led to me trying the same thing with both horses and getting very different reactions. For Des it was an extremely positive experience and one which helped him mentally and physically. For Tycoon, it reignited his significant claustrophobia and need to run. Not so good. I hope I have learned something and at least it proved that my horse and I now have enough ‘cash in the bank’ that we are still in the black despite this. But it just reminded me that one thing which worked for one horse really did not work for the other.

Hence, I am cautious of giving any advice until I meet the horse. And the person. I have recently been introduced to a big ginger mare (who has somewhat stolen my heart) who, had I just ‘read’ about her behaviour in an email, I might have thought somewhat differently about. She is an ex-competition horse and it seems has learned that her best line of defence is to come out fighting. I admire her tenacity and tenacity and that she has not just shut down and accepted her lot. I also love her owner for being so prepared to try to work things out from this horse’s perspective. She is a VERY big horse, and I think somewhere along the line she has ended up in situations on the ground where she has gone up on her back legs (quite an impressive sight) and it has either resulted in scaring humans off, or in a massive fight. Now, had this horse’s owner emailed me about this I ‘might’ have said (if I gave advice in emails) ‘The moment that horse hits the ground do something she doesn’t want to experience again – back her up, circle her tightly etc.’ But on meeting the mare it is pretty clear that she is sort of 'looking' for that kind of reaction from a person. Maybe she is so used to fighting with people that she just starts at where she knows it will end up anyway. So what we do when she rears is, well, nothing. Just let the reins (or rope) slide through your hand, breathe out, continue with what we were doing before. You can see her wildly blinking and thinking about this – I imagine that she is wondering when the fight will start, when she will get sent backwards or whalloped (not by her current owner I should add). I might be wrong, but it seems that way. We want to show her that we don’t want to fight and the only consequence for her action is to resume normal service. I wouldn’t have been able to suggest this without meeting the horse and getting a sense of what is happening (and also meeting the person, who is able to read her horse very well). There is another mare I am working with (who I also have a huge soft spot for) who also has a tendency to rear, and until recently, come at you and over the top you. Again, had the person just described to me what was happening I could have ‘prescribed’ something very different from what we are actually doing. I have been working with the horse for some time, and initially I set a couple of non negotiable boundaries – don’t blast through me and don’t come at me. We will work the rest out along the way. I couldn’t have explained how that was going to be done until I did it, as it has been a really organic process. And it has became apparent that she is an incredibly sensitive horse once you chip away the concrete outer layer, and that would have been easy to miss. It would have been a mistake to judge her on her write up (I know that, because I did it). She gets annoyed when a person’s timing is out, or if they do something she doesn't understand, as actually she is trying so hard to do what you ask. And it took me a little while to understand WHAT she was trying to communicate, as her reactions had become so massive it was hard to see the cause. Thankfully, she also has an owner who is more than prepared to listen and is working hard to make sense to her horse. And the other big ‘It depends’ element of it concerns where the person is at. What can they handle? What do they really want? A good example is of someone who contacts me to say that their horse doesn't go forward (this seems to be an issue for lots of people). It’s not until you meet the person that you can understand whether they really want to go forwards themselves. Very many of us don’t actually want to sit on the amount of forward our horse might really be able to offer. And I’m not into pushing people wildly out of their comfort zones - I’m not sure scaring the **** out of people is the best learning experience. You have to see what the person really wants right now, and what their experience and current capability allows them to do. Sometimes you have to work out a compromise which suits the person as well as the horse. What’s the point in telling them what the perfect solution would be for the horse, if it’s really not the perfect solution for them? And then there are all those little additional things which can be massive to horses, but which humans miss when diagnosing the problem. What if the reason the horse doesn’t go forward is because the person isn’t breathing, or they’re gripping with their thighs, or they are holding on to the horse’s mouth with a death grip? So many of us want a ‘How to’ formula, but until you know what the recipe is you can’t work out why the cake hasn't risen. It’s a bit too much like George’s Marvellous Medicine, you don’t ever know exactly how much brown shoe polish or toothpaste someone has put into the mix, and why Grandma is small this time when last time she shot through the roof. One day I hope I will stop making clanging misjudgements with my own horses. But the only way any of us are going to be able to get to the stage where we can quickly diagnose an issue and come up with a solution is to spend as much time as we can with as many horses as we can, getting things wrong and scratching our heads. Revel in your failures as they are the only thing which makes it possible for you to greet the next challenge with a little more understanding under your belt. And if anyone ever contacts you about a problem with their horse, tell them it depends, but don't forget what an annoying thing that is for someone to hear.

It seems that pretty much everyone else I know uses food as part of a reward based system for their horse. Either they use it in a very structured way, say through clicker training, or they use it in a more ad-hoc manner, sometimes marking particular things they are pleased with or punctuating the sessions with a treat. In recent times I have begun to feel like something of a pariah for not using food, and it has really made me question why I don’t for MY horses (this is not about anyone else’s horses and their choices, it is just about what is going on between me and my horses). I think this issue was really highlighted when at the most recent clinic with Philippe Karl, during a break, Tycoon turned around to touch me on the foot a few times, and PK said, ‘I think he is waiting for something!’ I knew that if I was to protest and explain that he never gets treated from the saddle I would look either a liar or a meanie. And it wasn’t the time to explain that I think the reason he does this is similar to why he touches me gently on the arm when we are working on the ground; which as far as I can ascertain is a kind of ‘checking-in’ behaviour. He tends to do it when he is worried about something and wants me to notice (and let him know that I have noticed) and he also does it when he wants his chin scratched, and sometimes he just does it to say ‘Hi’. This alone has warranted the thousands of hours and pounds that I have spent on this horse trying to work out some of the issues he has, as it always (sometimes unhelpfully) melts my heart. But I know he is not doing it to ask for a carrot. As with pretty much everything that has made me really consider what I do with horses, Tycoon has been the catalyst. My other two horses are pretty straightforward. O.k. I mean, Garbanzo is crossed with a giraffe, and Des seems to lurch through life from one mishap to the other, but essentially they are pretty easy. Des can be mentally tight and a bit obstreperous, and Garbanzo has some strong ideas about things on occasion, but they typically feel fine about life and people, and being asked to do stupid human things, and they mostly come out of the field the same each day (sometimes Des has a bandage on). Had I decided to use a food based reward system with either of these two, they would probably have got along well enough with it, and who knows, maybe I might have got really handy with it and be writing an entirely different blog post. However, Tycoon does not really feel o.k. about life. As Kathleen Lindley Beckham pointed out to me in an email recently, I have learned to accommodate Tycoon and it is only on this basis that we can work together. She is right. Something has happened to Tycoon somewhere along the line which has at least contributed to some physical issues (he has a couple of major scars, joint issues and immune and digestive problems) and taught him some fairly unhelpful lessons about life. The major one of those being the tactic to, ‘If in doubt RUN – and worry about who /what is attached to you afterwards’. How we overcame this is a book in its own right, but I did go through a stage of trying to use food to help him out. Now, I KNOW there are a million very experienced clicker trainers out there who will say I did everything wrong in terms of using food. I used it to reward him for dealing with situations he found difficult. I used it as a ‘thank you’. And ultimately I was using it as a way of apologising to him for what I wanted him to do. And it kind of worked. Tycoon LOVES food, so it was quite an incentive for him, and did clearly mark when he was doing something ‘right’. However, what Tycoon hates (even more than he loves food) is getting stuff wrong . And this approach meant that the whole time he wasn't receiving a food reward he was essentially wrong. It kind of made him more ‘obedient’, but it also kept him a little mentally tight. He was always waiting for the marking of what he had done correctly with a treat. The rest of the time he was (hypothetically and actually) holding his breath until he got it ‘right’ again. And the use of food (in the way that I was using it) didn't really get to the heart of why Tycoon felt scared about things. His panic and run drive was so strong that no amount of carrots were going to change that for him. I was still just chipping away at the surface. For a while I was signed up to Marijke De Jong’s on-line straightness training course . At this time she was using food rewards as part of her training, and it did ‘seem’ to my uneducated eyes that sometimes the horses were more concerned about when they were going to get a treat than being involved in what they were doing. A while later, when when I went to one of her clinics (and what a fine horsewoman she is) she explained that she had stopped using treats as she felt it detracted from the horse’s absorption in the learning process. So, maybe I wasn’t that far off the mark. When food is used badly it creates muggy, pushy, distracted horses. I know this doesn’t need to be the case and that says more about how the person has used food than the use of food treats. However, what I also saw when I used it (and I did at least know enough not to create mugging or pushing in my horses) was that it kind of inhibited the horse’s ability to just ‘mellow’ and be completely present in the work. It unhelpfully punctuated what we were doing together, sometimes wrecking the horse’s balance (what’s the point in preparing for a balanced halt and then damaging it by leaning forward to give your horse a treat and throwing him forwards again?), but most often it just added a mental distraction which neither of us needed. What I could have done was spent a long time learning how to use clicker training and food based rewards to a high standard, as I know many fine people have done. However, and this is where this is totally personal, it just doesn’t appeal to me. Selfish maybe, but you have to be honest about who you are. I knew I didn’t have the level of interest in that approach to do it really well, and doing it half cocked seems to cause SO many issues in horses that I just admitted that it wasn’t for me. There are things which I do in life for which I need no additional reward – I don’t need to be reinforced with something external to walk on the beach, or read a book, or listen to music. I also don’t need it to ride my horse. For me, the reward is very much in the feeling that exists between my horses and I. I love it. In fact, I am addicted to it. I began to try to find ways which might mean my horses could enjoy the sensation of working with me, which didn’t rely on ‘treats’. Could I find ways to show them that spending time with me, and working with me, was a nice enough thing in itself? Arrogant perhaps, but part of this crazy addiction. And for Tycoon, that is worth any amount of food treats. When I can find ways which come from the inside of me, to help him feel O.K from the inside out, then he doesn’t need a reward (or a compensation...?) in the form of food. It has been in changing me, and the way that I present things to him, which has helped him to stay with me in times of strife. What I think it boils down to is that basically, I am a hopeless romantic, with an insatiable desire to get to the heart of this ridiculous thing called horsemanship. Some people do that fabulously through a food based reward system. But for me, the bit of me that wants cannon balls and unicorns, scimitars and scarves (I think most of you get the reference by now), well I can’t help but want to find a way into the soul of the horse using whatever I can muster that comes from the very best of me. I might be on the wrong path, and look back in years to come and wish I had taken a different route, but for now, I am going to keep on asking my horses to give me some grace while I try to work things out from this perspective. N.B Now before you feel too sorry for my horses, they do get delicious haylage, a better balanced diet than most humans, plenty of carrots, and a lot of time bombing around with each other in the field. And mostly they are pretty happy about life these days, even Tycoon. N.b. 2. I am at liberty to change my mind about any of this at any time.